Video #1: A brief introduction to Virtual Northstar's involvement in Project Wonderland

Virtual Northstar's Wonderland Intro from Evan Smith on Vimeo.

CoE is a an acronym for Sun Center-of-Excellence which is program here to promote collaborative projects with universities around the world. Here's the new video of the Saint Paul COE for Wonderland opening to faculty and students for live mixed-reality classrooms in January.

The well-respected Joint Information Systems Committee e-Learning programme in the UK has just released an insightful report by Sara de Freitas on Serious Virtual Worlds which mentions both Wonderland and the MiRTLE project work done with Sun at the Essex University. A good read indeed.

The latest video update from Virtual Learning Labs featuring our mixed-reality classroom solution built on Project Wonderland which goes live at Saint Paul College in January

It was great to see the email from Nicole on Sunday night that the new Project Wonderland Technical Video Series was now available for download and the day before we opened the Sun booth on the show floor at Educause. They did a great job and it was fun to see our friends in education profiled for their great work. Then, last night at our Immersion SIG meet-up at Cafe Tu Tu Tango, the guys at IMI blew everyone away with a quick iphone video sneak preview of some of what's coming in 0.5. Enjoy the first chapter embedded below with what's here now and see why folks are excited and then get ready for what's to come in the not too distant future. Chapter one embedded below for a preview from the series

Bernard sent over the final report on the MiRTLE Project. Michael has joined with Virtual Learning Labs now in Europe and we are all starting to see real demand for this kind of social "mixed-reality" approach to educational and business collaboration using Wonderland. Including, winning our first pilot with a major publisher. This journey is just beginning.

The spotlight today turns back to the next-phase of our Moodle Reference Architecture with our great partner Moodlerooms, especially as national scale implementations in emerging markets move to the top of the agenda. This time we're bringing in the code to performance tune on an M5000 blade platform on Coolstack, add integration of the Alfresco open source repository on the Thumpers with ZFS , a Mahara open source e-Portfolio system and a bridge to Wonderland and immersive learning. Folks can either host the stack locally with complete support or just sign up for the hosted service cloud with both already proven and documented at $1/per year/per student with up to 1 million concurrent users. It's Hal's favorite LMS too which is fun.

Check out the great work by the labs east interns from WPI as they spruce up the team room in Wonderland for software design activities.

Things are shaping up fast for the Immersive Education Day set for next Monday at Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo where we will feature Project Wonderland and our national open immersive education initiative for Brasil. Then, it's off to the Land of the Rising Sun to bring Japan on to the Education Grid at the University of Aizu on November 18th. Last, is a move over to Europe with an Immersion event in London on 2/25 where we will start to see the amazing capabilities the team are creating in 0.5.

It was great to see the new link up and partnership in the communities section of the new Sun Student Zone. As I like to say, "Jobs 'r' Us". At least in an open source and free culture virtual reality business called Wonderland. As they say at the labs, "Go Ahead, Make a Scene". Thanks Colin.

Absolutely amazing news today as we shared the details on the University of Oregon NSF Grant win with Sun at the office of cyberinfrastructure. We're all jazzed to get started and make a big contribution to the research work at NSF in 3DVE and distributed teaming and innovation. It's a real honor. Jonathon posted the discussion forum today in the i-SIG. We'll present the project at the upcoming Immersive Education Day Europe event in London in February 2009. Details soon.

This morning Ian at Kings College London shared their interest in potentially bringing the open source GeoGebra mathematics software for schools which joins geometry, algebra
and calculus into the MiRTLE Environment. A quick look on line looks like it shouldn't be too much integration work since it's all Java. Stay tuned for more in the community forums.

The Bangkok Post is one of the most widely read english newspapers in Thailand. So, it was just fantastic to see our very own Andrew Lim on the front page of their IT section talking about our education community efforts in Wonderland to create the university of tomorrow.

While I usually don't read the Harvard Business Review. I happened to pick up a copy at the airport while waiting for a flight to Chicago recently with the lead story of "How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity". It's really an insightful article about people and the practices and theories the company employs to create great work as described by Ed Catmull, Pixar's CEO, which has been one of my favorite companies since visiting what was then the Lucasfilm animation department with Sun back in the 1980's. Since then, of course, they have gone on to mega-stardom. So, with all the creative community work being applied these days in our work with Wonderland in education, the ideas seem to definitely apply in our world and maybe yours too. It's worth picking up at the newstand or an online copy. And, be sure to share it with your Boss.

Commonneed has announced our pricing for a hosted world of your own in Wonderland for educational or commercial enterprises. Get all the details and see the other services they have for iGoogle integration, Flickr, digital repository integration and other webservices at Educause next month in the Sun booth. We're currently running/provisioning worlds using Solaris on AMD with next-testing on CMT and Intel blades with Thumpers as digital content repository.

Pricing for Hosting (based on Annual Subscription as of July 1st, 2008)

Integration and World development services are custom quoted based upon requirements

We are going to try to pull off the first inter-world live conference in support of the Radical Teaching and Unbounded Learning session at the NMC Rock the Academy event. The plan is take the live stream from event in Second Life and broadcast across a number of our Wonderland servers like Media Grid, Virtual Northstar, Commonneed, University of Essex and University of Oregon. We'll have a registration process soon on the Immersion SIG to register avatars for the Wonderland sites. Nov 4-6.

Check out Matt's cool new video on the iSocial Prototype Virtual Learning System being built on top of Project Wonderland at the University of Missouri to help individuals with autism learn social skills. 

A cool new video Nigel posted showing how webservices like the best phot-sharing site on the net can be experienced in 3-D. Commonneed has iGoogle integration too which we're showing on the show floor at educause

A nice re-connection today at the Ford Program who do just some amazing work for open education resources through their  Global Education Initiative (GEI). Watch for a new community discussion soon in the to combine our efforts and putting open curriculum across our network of Wonderland servers at schools around the world

Join Chris Melissinos on the Shift Radio live podcast starting this morning at 9am for a discussion on Future-making, the best of serious games that help us build a better future. Then, join our education community for immersive education to see where it all goes from here.